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Get Lit with All Of It: Kazuo Ishiguro

Get Lit with All Of It

Originally Aired: Monday, April 26, 2021

Overview

Watch a live video stream as Alison Stewart, host of WNYC’s All of It, continues her virtual book club series with author and Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. The acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go is back with Klara and the Sun, a thrilling and heartbreaking story of a robot girl designed as a playmate for real children. NPR describes it as “a masterpiece about love, life and mortality” and The Washington Post calls it “a delicate, haunting story, steeped in sorrow and hope.”

This event will also feature an interview and performance from Grammy-winner and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Rhiannon Giddens.

How it Works

  1. Get the book, reach out to a friend to join, and read along with Alison and Team All Of It
  2. Follow @allofitwnyc on Instagram where you’ll find polls, questions, fun facts and pictures of other readers
  3. Watch the live video stream here on this page as Alison talks with the author

Viewers are encouraged to submit their questions for the author on Twitter and Instagram.

Once again, All Of It teams up for this event with the New York Public Library so that New Yorkers can access the book for free through the NYPL app.

Please note that the archival video for this event will be posted until May 10th, 2021. 

Kazuo Ishiguro

Credit: Andrew Testa

 Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and moved to Britain at the age of five. His eight previous works of fiction have earned him many honors around the world, including the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Booker Prize. His work has been translated into over fifty languages, and The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, both made into acclaimed films, have each sold more than 2 million copies. He was given a knighthood in 2018 for Services to Literature. He also holds the decorations of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star from Japan.

Rhiannon Giddens

Credit: Photo by Ebru Yildiz

The acclaimed musician Rhiannon Giddens uses her art to excavate the past and reveal bold truths about our present. A MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, Giddens co-founded the Grammy Award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, and she has been nominated for six additional Grammys for her work as a soloist and collaborator. She was most recently nominated for her collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, there is no Other (2019). Giddens’s forthcoming album, They’re Calling Me Home, is a twelve-track album, recorded with Turrisi in Ireland during the recent lockdown; it speaks of the longing for the comfort of home as well as the metaphorical “call home” of death, which has been a tragic reality for so many during the COVID-19 crisis.

Giddens’s lifelong mission is to lift up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been erased, and to work toward a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins. Pitchfork has said of her work, “few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration,” and Smithsonian Magazine calls her “an electrifying artist who brings alive the memories of forgotten predecessors, white and black.”

Among her many diverse career highlights, Giddens has performed for the Obamas at the White House, served as a Carnegie Hall Perspectives curator, and received an inaugural Legacy of Americana Award from Nashville’s National Museum of African American History in partnership with the Americana Music Association. Her critical acclaim includes in-depth profiles by CBS Sunday Morning, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and NPR’s Fresh Air, among many others.

Giddens is featured in Ken Burns’s Country Music series, which aired on PBS in 2019, where she speaks about the African American origins of country music. She is also a member of the band Our Native Daughters with three other black female banjo players, Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell, and Amythyst Kiah, and co-produced their debut album Songs of Our Native Daughters (2019), which tells stories of historic black womanhood and survival.

Named Artistic Director of Silkroad Ensemble in 2020, Giddens is developing a number of new programs for that ensemble, including one inspired by the history of the American transcontinental railroad and the cultures and music of its builders. She recently wrote the music for an original ballet, Lucy Negro Redux, for Nashville Ballet (premiered in 2019), and the libretto and music for an original opera, Omar, based on the autobiography of the enslaved man Omar Ibn Said for the Spoleto USA Festival (premieres in 2022).

As an actor, Giddens had a featured role on the television series Nashville.

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